LETTERS
LETTERS Baby switching I was saddened to see you go along with the rest of the crowd and the conventional wisdom on the question of Hill and Knowlton’s activity on behalf of Citizens for a...
...ERWIN FUCHS Seattle, Washington Injudicious Stephanie Mencimer’s article on the failure of the judiciary to police its own ranks [“Bl.ack Robe,” March] provides a welcome focus on a seriously neglected area...
...Of course, Forer suggests that my view reflects “an atavistic belief in the sanctity of punishment,” because over the past five years, the “number of known crimes . . . has increased 10 percent...
...Courts and my colleague in the investigations, William Trencher, resigned...
...Guercio was fired, not several years later, but within six months of Hackett’s departure, after pointing out the racketeer affiliations of an individual who is now on the U.S...
...LETTERS Baby switching I was saddened to see you go along with the rest of the crowd and the conventional wisdom on the question of Hill and Knowlton’s activity on behalf of Citizens for a Free Kuwait (Monthly Journalism Award, April 1992...
...Thanks, Judge Forer, for persuading me that you are wrong...
...I do not believe there has ever been any question about Lupo’s ability as a judge or about her personal conduct...
...This is a very serious charge...
...After reading Judge Lois Forer’s article [“Justice by Numbers,” April] attacking mandatory sentencing, such schemes now seem pretty appealing...
...The whole issue of corruption in the federal judiciary, which the Administrative Office confronted for the first time in its history under the leadership of former Chief of the Bankruptcy Division Berkeley Wright and General Counsel Carl H. Imlay, was simply too hot to handle...
...I worked for Byron in the early eighties, whili: Lucy was heading the Bismarck office...
...Courts...
...At one point, the effort to reform the court completely stalled., and it was necessary to send a communication to the chief justice of the United States outside the normal channels in order to get things moving again...
...New York...
...You call the women “victims,” but it was never proven in any court that they were victims of Smith...
...Between 1960 and 1970, we implemented Judge Forer’s policy of reducing imprisonment (from 212,000 inmates to 196,000) and had a 140 percent increase in crime...
...Bankruptcy Judge Harry Hackett left the bench in complete disgrace and has no courthouse named after him...
...MILNER BENEDICT Cheverly, Maryland Milner Benedict is a former staff attorney for the bankruptcy division of the Administrative OfJice of the US...
...I do not believe, if you were charged with such an act, that you would like the court to allow the introduction of your past conduct while a student at Columbia University and your other youthful activities, as spelled out in your autobiography...
...This type of journalism certainly gives the impression that Lupo was behaving in less than a judicial manner and might be guilty of unethical conduct...
...After conducting certain addi.tiona1 investigations, I was terminated by the Administrative Office of the U.S...
...I am not a fan of this generation of Kennedys, but they are entitled to a fair and just trial, the same as any other defendant...
...Supreme Court...
...That’s not true...
...If the judiciary had policed the ranks of its peers more effectively and with more vigor-getting rid of all the fools, psychos, weirdos, and winos-it wouldn’t have needed the mandatory sentencing system, because we the people would have been more inclined to forgive-if not forget-the occasional honest mist.ke...
...Judge, not As a law clerk for two federal judges, I saw the federal sentencing guidelines in action and came to question whether mandatory sentencing schemes were a good idea...
...Lucy started working for Byron back in the seventies, when he was the elected state tax commissioner in North Dakota...
...John MacArthur’s “op-ed” in The New York Times-which nobody seems to have bothered to fact-check-turns out to be just about 100 percent wrong...
...Bankruptcy Court...
...None of these three women had ever filed any formal charges, nor had any investigation by proper authorities ever been undertaken...
...It follows that as long as many state judges think like Forer, I would want to give them as little discretion in sentencing as possible...
...But she was an actual court employee (of the Wayne County circuit court) for only two years before moving to the U.S...
...It was hardly extraordinary that she should go to work for Byron, considering how long the two had worked together...
...Helen Jean Guercio, the complainant in the Detroit case, owned one of only two companies preparing appeal papers to the Michigan Supreme Court on behalf of attorneys throughout the state of Michigan and had 45 years of experience in the legal system...
...BROTHERTON JR...
...District Court bench...
...However, a courthouse was constructed in Ann Arbor in honor of John Feikens, the former chief judge of the US...
...There is no doubt that your general point is true: that “Washington’s favored technique for avoiding outright nepotism while placing relatives in nice jobs is to have a friend do the hiring...
...In most cases, this type of evidence is inadmissible, and Lupo acted properly and ruled as most of the judges in West Virginia would have ruled...
...The article, however, contains serious filctual errors...
...If somebody with as much coinmon sense and human decency as Judge Forer found it imperative to resign from the bench to square it with her conscience, our criminal justice system is in an even worse sitate than I thought...
...FRANK MANKIEWICZ Washington, D.C...
...Lupo’s decision in not allowing the testimony of three other alleged victims of Smith was a legal decision and probably a proper one...
...Then, in 1986, Kent Conrad was elected to the Senate...
...Brotherton is a justice of the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia...
...As a result, I now favor mandatory sentencing (at least for the most threatening theft-related crimes, such as armed robbery...
...The ambassador’s daughter was in Kuwait at the time (at great personal risk), the committee staff members knew exactly who she was and complied with her request for anonymity (much in the way hoodlums are permitted to testify wearing ski masks), and, most important of all, the story she told about the incubators turns out to be true...
...JON ROWE New York...
...After years of appeals, her right to a trial by jury was denied by the US...
...District Court in Detroit to whom Guercio had fruitlessly directed her complaints...
...The Detroit case very nearly ended up proving that the system doesn’t work...
...Mankiewicz is vice chairman of Hill and Knowlton Public Affairs Worldwide Company...
...By contrast, I believe that sticking a gun in someone’s face is truly a violent crime, because it threatens its victim with bodily harm and endangers everyone’s sense of public safety...
...Charleston, West Virginia Mr...
...Apparently no one argued that this testimony might have shown a course of conduct by Smith that might possibly have been a stronger legal argument than the claim that the prior acts were similar...
...Lucy came to Washington with him because they were married...
...The outcome of the matter in Detroit was a much closer call than it appears in retrospect...
...When Byron won his House seat in 1980, he put Lucy in charge of his district office in Bismarck, the state capitol...
...Their willingness to come forward only after the passage of time certainly put the defendant at a disadvantage and probably would have required three trials within the main trial to determine the true facts, all of which would be highly prejudicial to the defendant...
...But the example doesn’t fit...
...They simply made charges after the fact that Smith had made similar advances toward them...
...Forer evidently believes that armed robbery and burglary are not dangerous crimes justifying imprisonment, but are mere “theft” crimes analogous to embezzlement or shoplifting...
...Lupo’s loophole In your March “Tilting at Windmills” you indicated that Judge Lupo threw the William Kennedy Smith case to attorney Black...
...W.T...
...She was extremely effective in that post, and it is wrong to suggest that she got her current job as a favor to her husband...
...I know it’s a better story if a PR firm manipulated the news-particularly on a hot issue-but every once in a while even one of us flacks turns out to be telling the truth -and when we do, we sure would like credit in The Washington Monthly...
...I love Lucy May’s “Who’s Who” suggests that Congressman Byron Dorgan hired Lucy Calautti as a favor to his fellow North Dakotan, Senator Kent Conrad, to whom Calautti is married...
...I thought The Washington Monthly reported the news and drafted editorial articles based on knowledge of the facts and not hyperbole...
...MICHAEL E. LEWYN Atlanta, Georgia Judge Forer is correct in stating that mandatory sentencing is an atrocity, but to a large exi:ent the bench can blame only itself...
Vol. 24 • June 1992 • No. 6
